Category Archives: Yiddish

Sholem Asch: A Yiddish Playwright Ahead of His Time

11 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Jewish Culture, Kutno, Pre-World War II, Yiddish

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Kutno’s native son Sholem Asch is in the news a hundred years after writing a play that deals with issues that remain controversial today. His work also shatters a lot of assumptions about Jewish life in Poland in the early 20th century–Written in Yiddish, it features a brothel, a Torah scroll, and love between two women. Asch’s play God of Vengeance was written in Yiddish in 1907 and first produced in Berlin in 1910. I found an electronic version of the 1918 English translation (you can follow the hotlink above). In the play, Yekel, who lives with his family above the brothel he owns, tries to improve his family’s status by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying his daughter Rifkele to a Yeshiva student. Instead, the young daughter falls in love with one of the prostitutes and in a pivotal scene, they kiss. The play highlights the tension between piety, reflected in the Holy Scroll that is supposed to bring respectability to the family and the economic and sensual attraction of the brothel downstairs, as well as observations about women’s empowerment and oppression.

The play has been getting attention recently because of Paula Vogel’s Broadway play Indecent, a play about a Yiddish play that was ahead of its time (as the NPR report about Indecent is titled). Vogel’s play centers around the 1923 staging of God of Vengeance in New York’s Apollo Theater (also on Broadway), notable because the whole cast, the producer, and one of the theatre owners were arrested and eventually convicted of indecency. The play had been controversial where it had been staged throughout Europe, but it also received critical acclaim.

The popularity of Indecent has led to renewed interest in Asch and his play, which was recently produced at LaMaMa Experimental Theater in the East Village (In God of Vengeance, a Nice Jewish Family Lives Above a Brothel).

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From left, Eleanor Reissa, Shayna Schmidt and Shane Baker as Orthodox Jewish parents and their marriageable young daughter in Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” at La MaMa. Credit Richard Termine for The New York Times

 

 

Chil Majer Piwko’s death notices in the Yiddish press

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Archives, Family, Piwko, Polish-Jewish relations, Yiddish

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After reading my previous post about Chil Majer Piwko’s death notice, my cousin Raphael from Switzerland sent me a couple more that were published the same day (June 16 1929). These were in the Yiddish newspapers Hajnt and Der Moment.

Chil Majer Piwko's death notice from the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Moment

Chil Majer Piwko’s death notice from the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Moment

Chil Majer Piwko's death notice from the Yiddish-langugage newspaper Hajnt

Chil Majer Piwko’s death notice from the Yiddish-langugage newspaper Hajnt

Besides wanting to share them, this gives me the opportunity to revise what I said about Chil Majer. My conversations with a couple of readers helps me realize my hasty use of the term “assimilated” (even though it is widely used in the historic literature) probably does not communicate what I intended. What I meant to signal was that Chil Majer likely considered himself Polish as well as Jewish. But I have no doubt that he was also a very religious man. Nor did I mean to suggest he was on the road to adopting Polish culture in replacement of his Jewish faith. On the contrary, I’m interested in the places and spaces where Polish and Jewish affiliations intersected, complemented each other, or existed side by side.

The fact that his death notice appeared in three Jewish newspapers emphasizes even more strongly the important position Chil Majer filled in the community. The Polish-language Nasz Przegląd tended to take a more integrationist stance, in the sense that it catered to Jews who were comfortable operating in the Polish language, and who tended to invision a place for Jews within the broader Polish society. The Yiddish-language Haynt and Der Moment were competing papers that were Zionist in orientation. As such, they tended to highlight the interests of Jews as distinct from the Polish (Catholic) majority. The publication of the death notice in both languages shifts the emphasis, indicating an allegiance to both Jewish autonomy and to Polish-Jewish allegiances.

For more information about the Jewish press, see a brief summary by the Yivo Institute or Angela White’s dissertation on the Polish language Jewish press.